Rick W. Burkett runs the John A. Logan College Teaching and Learning Center, teaches history, and heads an educational nonprofit. He publishes blogs on a wide variety of topics, including history, teaching and learning, student success, and teaching online.

Some faculty wanted to expand Amherst’s repertoire and experiment online. Even professors who opposed a deal with edX say the college should look at doing more online. But the majority of faculty came to doubt edX on a number of fronts.

. . .

Some Amherst faculty concerns about edX were specific to Amherst. For instance, faculty asked, are MOOCs, which enroll tens of thousands of students, compatible with Amherst’s mission to provide education in a “purposefully small residential community” and “through close colloquy?”

They also expressed broader concerns about the direction in which edX and others like it are taking higher education.

Rick W. Burkett runs the John A. Logan College Teaching and Learning Center, teaches history, and heads an educational nonprofit. He publishes blogs on a wide variety of topics, including history, teaching and learning, student success, and teaching online.

Daphne Koller is a professor at Stanford University. She is co-founder, with Andrew Ng, of Coursera, which is one of the emerging leaders in massively open online courses (MOOCs). Coursera currently offers classes from 16 top colleges. This video addresses what they are learning from this new online modality. The implications on student learning clearly have applicability to traditional online and supplemental courses as well.

Rick W. Burkett runs the John A. Logan College Teaching and Learning Center, teaches history, and heads an educational nonprofit. He publishes blogs on a wide variety of topics, including history, teaching and learning, student success, and teaching online.

Tanya Roscorla has an interesting Post on Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs) over at Converage Magazine. She quotes Jonathan Becker, an assistant professor of educational leadership at Virginia Commonwealth University, as stating that the announcement by 12 more schools to offer this types of courses “is a pretty loud call to action for other universities.” He believes that this announcement “legitimizes these types of courses.

The 12 schools (California Institute of Technology, Duke University, Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, Georgia Institute of Technology, Johns Hopkins University, Rice University, UC San Francisco, University of Edinburgh, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, University of Toronto, University of Virginia and University of Washington) all signed an agreement with Coursera, which is a company started last year by two computer science faculty at Stanford University.

Rick W. Burkett runs the John A. Logan College Teaching and Learning Center, teaches history, and heads an educational nonprofit. He publishes blogs on a wide variety of topics, including history, teaching and learning, student success, and teaching online.